An effective defensive node against jamming attacks in sensor networks

Jamming is defined as the act of intentionally directing electromagnetic energy towards a communication system to disrupt or prevent signal transmission. In the context of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), jamming is the type of attack which interferes with the radio frequencies used by sensor nodes and may be viewed as a special case of denial of service (DoS) attacks. Herein, we outline the possible jamming attacks a WSN may encounter. The main contribution of this paper is the outline of the design specifications of a prototype node ‘Ares’ that effectively defends jamming attacks. Our focus is on frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) and direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS), two of the most effective countermeasures against jamming. The main novel aspect of Ares is that it uses a hybrid FHSS–DSSS approach to defend jamming attacks. We suggest the use of a specific FHSS technique in 5GHz band with 51 frequency channels wherein the channel sequence is generated using a key (which derives from a secret word), known only to the sink and the sensor nodes, as a seed. Each channel uses DSSS modulation with 16-bit pseudo noise (PN) code. The PN code derives from the same key used for FHSS channel generation. The pre-eminence of our method against alternative anti-jamming techniques is demonstrated through extensive simulation tests. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.